AP Exclusive: Accuser filed complaint in next job

FILE - This December 1999 image from video shows then-Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesperson Karen Kraushaar at a news conference in Miami regarding Elian Gonzalez. The Associated Press has chosen to publish Kraushaar's name, after independently confirming she was one of the accusers who filed sexual harassment complaints against Herman Cain when she and Cain worked at a restaurant trade group. (AP Photo/APTN)
— AP

FILE - This December 1999 image from video shows then-Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesperson Karen Kraushaar at a news conference in Miami regarding Elian Gonzalez. The Associated Press has chosen to publish Kraushaar's name, after independently confirming she was one of the accusers who filed sexual harassment complaints against Herman Cain when she and Cain worked at a restaurant trade group. (AP Photo/APTN)
/ AP

FILE - This March 2000 image from video shows then-Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesperson Karen Kraushaar at a news conference in Miami regarding Elian Gonzalez. The Associated Press has chosen to publish Kraushaar's name, after independently confirming she was one of the accusers who filed sexual harassment complaints against Herman Cain when she and Cain worked at a restaurant trade group. (AP Photo/APTN)— AP

FILE - This March 2000 image from video shows then-Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesperson Karen Kraushaar at a news conference in Miami regarding Elian Gonzalez. The Associated Press has chosen to publish Kraushaar's name, after independently confirming she was one of the accusers who filed sexual harassment complaints against Herman Cain when she and Cain worked at a restaurant trade group. (AP Photo/APTN)
/ AP

WASHINGTON 
A woman who settled a sexual harassment complaint against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain in 1999 complained three years later at her next job about unfair treatment, saying she should be allowed to work from home after a serious car accident and accusing a manager of circulating a sexually charged email, The Associated Press has learned.

Karen Kraushaar, 55, filed the complaint while working as a spokeswoman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Justice Department in late 2002 or early 2003, with the assistance of her lawyer, Joel Bennett, who also handled her earlier sexual harassment complaint against Cain in 1999. Three former supervisors familiar with Kraushaar's complaint, which did not include a claim of sexual harassment, described it for the AP under condition of anonymity because the matter was handled internally by the agency and was not public.

To settle the complaint at the immigration service, Kraushaar initially demanded thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, according to a former supervisor familiar with the complaint. The promotion itself would have increased her annual salary between $12,000 and $16,000, according to salary tables in 2002 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Kraushaar told the AP she considered her employment complaint "relatively minor" and she later dropped it.

"The concern was that there may have been discrimination on the job and that I was being treated unfairly," Kraushaar said.

Kraushaar said Tuesday she did not remember details about the complaint and did not remember asking for a payment, a promotion or a Harvard fellowship. Bennett, her lawyer, declined to discuss the case with the AP, saying he considered it confidential. Kraushaar left her job at the immigration service after dropping the complaint in 2003, and she went to work at the Treasury Department.

Details of the workplace complaint that Kraushaar made at the immigration service are relevant because they could offer insights into how she responded to conflicts at work. She now works as a spokeswoman in the office of the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration.

Kraushaar's complaint was based on supervisors denying her request to work full time from home after a serious car accident in 2002, three former supervisors said. Two of them said Kraushaar also was denied previous requests to work from home before the car accident.

The complaint also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because "in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on." Women were like computers because "even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval."